Internet reaches for its full potential

By BILL VIRGIN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, June 2, 2003

A local car dealer has a Web site on which you can schedule a service appointment, specifying the date, time and work to be done. "This is great," I said as I signed up. Yes it would be, said the apologetic employee at the dealership when I called after several days of getting no confirmation, except that it doesn't notify the dealer's service department until the day of the appointment.

An online electronics dealer advertises an attractive price for a popular model of a digital camera and advises that the model is in stock and can be shipped immediately. Except it isn't and can't be, says the clerk when I call after checking on the tracking feature of the Web site and see that not only has it not been shipped, it is accompanied by those dreaded words "back order."

And when might it be ready? Maybe end of May, maybe end of June, who knows?

A local mortgage company offers its customers a way to post questions and get a prompt e-mail response. A week later, no response. If an e-mail is never read, did it ever really exist?

Ah, life on the Internet. There are still a few bugs in the system to work out.

You remember the earliest days of the Internet, the predictions that it would be more revolutionary than paper, the telephone and broadcasting put together, that it would dramatically change the way consumers lived their lives and business operated.

Then the pendulum swung to the other extreme -- the Internet aspired to replace paper, telephone and broadcasting, but wasn't as good as any of them. All hype and no innovation, the Net was slow, buggy, clunky, occasionally intrusive and even dangerous -- and about as revolutionary as the toaster oven.

Now we're seeing signs of backlash to the backlash, of the pendulum being pushed back to the other end of its swing: The detritus of hucksters, nitwits and dilettantes has been cleared away, so the Internet can now fully realize its revolutionary potential.

Little in life is as bad as portrayed by its worst critic or as wonderful as described by its most starry-eyed devotee. But the Internet comes close to both. Certainly it lived up to superlatives in its early days -- what other technology has generated more hype or melted away more billions in investment capital?

The Internet is still a long way from meeting that land-of-milk-and-honey vision promoters were always promising.

But it's also evident we're well beyond the point that businesses and consumers are dazzled by the bright shiny object that is a Web site. Now those potential users expect the Web site to actually do something, and do so quickly and efficiently.

And every now and then we get some hints that someone out there has gotten the message.

A few examples: One organization that seems to get it is the King County Library System. For several years now I've been able to check out books, movies on tape and DVD and music CDs, renew them, reserve them (and see how many requests are ahead of yours) and check due dates all online at www.kcls.org. Need to know if a specific book you need for that last-minute research paper your kid is working on is on the shelf of your local branch? The system will tell you.

In the course of using the system, and several successive versions and updates, the interruptions and glitches have been minimal. It's a terrifically efficient system for the user, and probably saves the library a lot of time handling queries and a lot of paper sending out notices.

Here's another who gets it mostly right -- the local credit union where I have my account and an online bill-paying service. The system is relatively straightforward and quick to set up, and paying bills is even easier.

Does the U.S. Postal Service wonder where first-class volume has gone? E-mail has gotten a lot of blame for killing the personal letter, but the handwritten note was an endangered species long before e-mail arrived. A more likely culprit is bill paying. There's six letters a month I'm not sending each month. And while the day of bill presentment (the utility or credit card sends you the bill electronically) is a ways off from widespread acceptance, imagine the impact on paper consumption and postage when that happens.

And here's one more that gets it, even though it's a conventional-wisdom choice (just look at the stock price and the spate of glowing press recently): Amazon.com, at least in the books, music and movie category. Its Web site has proven relatively easy to navigate in researching less well-known authors or finding which song is on which specific CD, and ordering has been efficient.

Real-life revolutions do not move as fast as we expect our online connections to these days. They come in slow motion, in fits and starts, a few steps back for each leap forward, some failures to balance the successes.

But the Internet revolution is coming -- in fact it's already in place. You'll be seeing more of it, not in the form of dramatic advances but as quiet improvements and the disappearance of glitches and hiccups. Be patient. Repeatedly hitting the "Enter" key or pounding the left-click mouse button isn't going to make it arrive any faster.